Jeffrey Frankel, The US Recovery Turns Ten
(Project Syndicate, June 14, 2019)
Maybe a bit of a dry read, but essential to understand what’s going on and how deceptive comparisons can be. According to the Harvard professor, the best explanation for the current ten-year US economic expansion is disappointingly simple: the Great Recession was the worst downturn since the 1930s. And if the dates of American business cycles were determined by the rule that most other countries apply, the current expansion would be far from beating the record (7-8 min. read).
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François Delattre, The World Grows More Dangerous by the Day
(The New York Times, June 11, 2019)
These are the parting thoughts of the French UN ambassador as he leaves America. He says it as he sees it: “The world is growing more dangerous and less predictable by the day” and “We are now in a new world disorder. The three main safety mechanisms are no longer functioning: no more American power willing to be the last-resort enforcer of international order; no solid system of international governance; and, most troubling, no real concert of nations able to re-establish common ground”. Hard to disagree! (Reads in 6-7 min).
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Timothy Aeppel, MIT Economist Tracks Shifting Job Trends
(Medium, June 9, 2019)
David Autor is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the future of work. His main insight is that the upward mobility that rural workers once experienced as they moved to cities and began working their way into higher-paying and more secure middle-skilled jobs have disappeared. They are now increasingly clustered into low-end service jobs instead of middle-skilled jobs. He calls it the “bifurcation of work”: the less-educated workers in urban areas now provide care and for the affluent (reads in 5 min).
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Amanda Mull, The Future of Marketing Is Bespoke Everything
(The Atlantic, June 11, 2019)
Thanks to advances in manufacturing, data collection, and the direct-to-consumer nature of online shopping, personalization is becoming the hot new thing at much more accessible prices – especially in the wellness industry. This trend taps into something powerful: the idea that we’re all fancy and special enough to have something made just for us. The problem with personalization: when it works, competitors (i.e. the big brands) do it (reads in 7-8 min).
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Knvul Sheikh, How Much Nature Is Enough? 120 Minutes a Week, Doctors Say
(The New York Times, June 13, 2019)
As we make it a business to take our clients outside, this is music to our ears! It’s a medical and psychological fact: spending time outdoors, especially in green spaces, is good for us; so much so that nature prescriptions are now growing in popularity around the world. As this article explains, researchers have just quantified the ideal amount of time needed to reap the health benefits of the great outdoors. It’s about 2 hours a week (reads in 5-6 min).
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